Freemarket environmentalism and more

Doris Lessing quotes

A mixed bag.

“What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.” From The Golden Notebook

On feminism: “Contemporary women scream or swoon at the sight of a penis they have not been introduced to, feel demeaned by a suggestive remark and send for a lawyer if a man pays them a compliment.”

On hearing that she had won the Nobel prize for literature. “Oh, Christ! I couldn’t care less.”

On the 9/11 attacks: “September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.”

“I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.”

“Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.” From The Golden Notebook

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.” From The Golden Notebook.

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” From Under My Skin.